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Erin Pohan: How to Help Your Clients Understand Accounting | The Disruptors
Connect with your clients: “You’re an entrepreneur, I’m an entrepreneur.”
Sponsored by True Advisor: The Definitive Success Guide for Client Advisory Services by Hitendra Patil
The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
Erin Pohan’s firm, Upkeeping, is on a mission “to make accounting relevant and understandable” to all its clients. Pohan describes Upkeeping as “a tax-ready firm” that does everything but tax prep, which they hand off to the clients’ tax professionals. But their hand-off doesn’t stop with providing the tax pro with the information needed for the tax return.
“We don’t believe in just handing pieces of paper over to our clients and letting them run with it,” she explains. “We do work with them throughout the year. We do our client calls where we’re explaining the numbers and the stories behind the numbers, especially, and making sure that they feel equipped and empowered to understand their business finances.”
Rillet’s Raise: Betting $100 Million on Fewer Accountants
$1 Billion Valuation Puts AI at the Center of Accounting’s Next Software War
By CPA Trendlines Research
Rillet’s new financing round values the accounting software company at $1 billion as AI-native ledgers, accounting agents and incumbent ERP vendors compete for control of the accounting workflow — and investors fund competing answers to the profession’s labor problem.
Rillet’s $100 million Series C gives the market another heavily financed challenger just six months after Basis raised $100 million at a $1.15 billion valuation. Around them, Ramp, Digits, Puzzle, Light and SoftLedger are pushing into different layers of the finance stack while Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Workday and NetSuite defend systems already embedded in corporate accounting.
The fight is over where artificial intelligence belongs in accounting software – inside the system of record, in agents operating across existing systems or in a new layer that sits around the ERP and performs the work.
“What stands out to us is how customers actually run on it — multi-billion-dollar businesses operating with finance teams a tenth the traditional size, closing their books continuously,” says Seth Pierrepont, an ICONIQ general partner and Rillet board member.
David Podell: The Retirement Plan Provision Most Tax Advisers Overlook | The Concierge CPA
Solo 401(k)s let you think beyond retirement.
CPA Trendlines: Where Accounting Pros Go Pro. – See Today’s Special Offer
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The Concierge CPA
With Jackie Meyer
MORE Jackie Meyer | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network
Podell explains the solo 401(k)’s advantages over simpler plans like SEPs or SIMPLEs, dives into common mistakes business owners make, and shares how smart structuring — including leveraging Roth contributions and defined benefit add-ons — can elevate retirement planning from compliance to strategy.
“Putting money in these retirement plans pulls money out of the business and creates a personal net worth,” Podell says.
Five Ways to Evaluate Your Leadership Team
Not just once, either.
By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge
“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” – Andrew Carnegie, industrialist
MORE by Anthony Zecca
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The above quote by Andrew Carnegie really puts a fence around the key responsibilities of your leadership team:
- Ability to lead their team to work together toward a common vision
- Ability to direct (drive) their individual team members’ efforts and accomplishments toward maintaining alignment with the firm’s objectives and
- Ability to inspire and motivate each team member to achieve more than they have and to reach top performance and top results as a team
Why the Profession’s Best Are Walking Away from Partnership | Gear Up for Growth
Firms, not candidates, are to blame for a generation of superstars declining the summons.
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Gear Up for Growth
with Jean Caragher
for CPA Trendlines
Few voices carry more weight on the question of who becomes a partner, and why, than Jim Metzler’s.
So when the former AICPA vice president and longtime mentor to emerging firm leaders says the profession’s top performers are hesitating at the threshold of partnership, firm owners would do well to listen.
MORE Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | MORE Gear Up for Growth here |
In the new episode of “Gear Up for Growth,” hosted by Jean Caragher of Capstone Marketing, Metzler lays out why – and what separates the firms that keep their stars from the ones that lose them.
“The bigger the superstar in the firm, the more they say, ‘I’m really not sure if I want to be a partner,'” says Jim Metzler, founder of Metzler Advisory Group and author of “The Emerging Partner Playbook: A Complete Guide for Emerging Partners in CPA Firms,” this edition of “Gear Up for Growth,” powered by CPA Trendlines and hosted by Jean Caragher, president of Capstone Marketing. READ MORE →